


no disaster

by gogollescent



Category: Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu | Legend of the Galactic Heroes
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 19:18:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17028477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: For the prompt "Hilda, 22--how does this character spend their money?"





	no disaster

After playing steward to her father’s estate, her salary seemed like a toy: clearly good to have, or better to have than not, but not very useful for a young woman of rank. Not that it was hard to imagine the life it could have saved, if she had had another father. Probably it would have secured her loyalty to Reinhard, or somehow led her to resent him. 

As it was she could secure her loyalty herself. But she liked toys that presented challenges, and disposing sensibly of a secretary’s stipend was hard enough. She experimented with spending, with saving, then with saving to spend; the first suit she owned outright was more expensive than it needed to be, because it felt a little oafish to be clever with her wages. What was more, she couldn’t resist wearing it out of the shop. 

That night she went to report her progress among the nobility to Reinhard, in a little restaurant that had closed its doors for him. She also meant to sound him out more seriously on land reform, and ended by saying more than she’d planned to herself, egged on by his unfolding range of quizzical expressions. At one point he interrupted her: “Is that a new suit?”

“Yes.” She was too surprised to be gratified. Nothing normally stood between Hildegard von Mariendorf and a compliment, but around Reinhard she tried to be careful, bearing—as she did—responsibility for her father’s faith in her, as well as for her own entertainment. “How did you know?”

His frown deepened. Without looking at her or at her very sedate grey frock-coat, he said, “I didn’t recognize it.”

So? “Is something the matter?”

Still avoiding her eyes, he relaxed; he had been sitting almost straight, and now leaned out of the circle of candlelight. The restaurant was dark but for their table’s conspiracy, and every time a groundcar passed it flung up their shadows, carousel-wise, spinning flat giants from wall to wall. But except for the halogen glow alighting, often, on the tips of his light hair, he was unaltered. He had emptied his glass of prosecco and now tipped it back steeply by the stem; yes, he _was_ relaxed, and glad (she thought) not to have to ask a clear question about her tailor. “Kircheis says I should pay more attention to my friends.”

She was so delighted she didn’t immediately answer. She had a sip of her cider. She was trying to imagine under what circumstances Kircheis had told Reinhard, in so many words, that he was an insensitive— 

And busy, too, wondering what Kircheis would make of Reinhard repeating his advice. “But,” she said at last, reasonably, smile peeling at her lips: “supposing that’s true, shouldn’t you heed my recommendations, first, and then my clothes?” 

“I was listening.” He was never embarrassed by criticism, accurate or not. “Go on. You were telling me what I had to fear from our enemies’ children.”

There was another side to her happiness. It was the thought that, although Kircheis was right, and although Reinhard would need to learn graces, he would never learn to use them with her. She too obviously needed nothing from him, besides the trust he’d offered on a whim. For just that reason, he was right to trust her: if someday, if ever he changed, it wouldn’t be for her sake. 

She came home late, drunk on self-importance. The suit took on irresistible significance, as the occasion of a new idea: she thought again about the stitching, the fit, the unaccustomed coolness that had seized her tongue when she declined to balk at the tailor’s price—and fell asleep worrying, happily, that a little lapse in thrift was the seed which led admirals to kill millions. And woke up the next morning thinking perhaps it wasn’t, after all.

Never mind! Never mind, Hilda. She was almost twenty. She had chosen Reinhard for the sake of her living family, and even the Mariendorf name, which she thought wouldn’t blush, in time, for its remembered oath to bold von Lohengramm; but more and more she found herself behaving—thinking—like _Fraulein_ Mariendorf, a person as if created for the sake of Reinhard’s government, out of nothing… the way so many of his inner circle seemed to be. (Not fair in the slightest. They all had colorful backgrounds. Mittermeyer’s happy home, Reuenthal’s nest of grievances; Oberstein’s vision, and Kircheis’s great heart. But these were questions to which Reinhard was the natural and likely the only answer. Whereas so far as she knew, she had made a decision, at the start of the war.)

*

When Kircheis died, she bought flowers for his grave with her money; and ordered cup after cup of rusty-tasting tea on the train back to the capital. 

She was unpleasantly damp and too warm. She had opened the window, but not much rain burst through. And she hadn’t thought to book a private car, so when an old man sat across from her, she thought about him shamelessly, having glanced once at his face and not again: A pale blue eye, stubble on the slack cheek, and a commoner’s greatcoat and trousers, worn translucent at the knee. Therefore she needn’t fear a noble assassin. They had no sense of understatement; the trousers would be darned.

(As a matter of fact, she was never afraid, although sometimes her courage gave her pause. They had won one war. Reinhard was half-crazed. Even so, she had work to do.)

Because the man was old and her shoes were muddy from the graveyard, she grew superstitious on his behalf, ready to tally up what years remained to him. But then she came to her senses. Kircheis had been twenty when he died, her mother thirty; and so on. Sometimes it took an effort to calm the fear she did not feel. No one—in her opinion—could afford to die in this era, the first age in five centuries that sprouted hope like apple buds, and bent low to be shaken for its fruit; but people did die. It was her business to use whatever remained to better this world, which despite all missing things was complete unto itself… though it shrank. Forgetting her own convictions, she closed her hand, grasping the stems of the flowers she had left behind, feeling their abandoned heft, and creasing the waxed paper. She wandered back over the green path, white markers breaking up the fog of rain like wavetops; thus and thus, thus and so, a regular progression of shapes only part-seen. 

“Young man,” croaked her companion, “aren’t you cold?”

“Why, yes,” she said, and closed the window she had cracked. Hearing her voice, he got up to beg pardon—and Hilda gazed up smiling, meaning to make him sit. She raised her voice to be heard above the low hum from the rails. “That was thoughtless. Let me get you a hot drink?”


End file.
